Configuration¶

After installation we can prepare our project for object permissions handling. In a settings module we need to add guardian to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    'guardian',
)

and hook guardian’s authentication backend:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend', # this is default
    'guardian.backends.ObjectPermissionBackend',
)

As django-guardian supports anonymous user’s object permissions we also need to add following to our settings module:

ANONYMOUS_USER_ID = -1

Note

Once project is configured to work with django-guardian, calling syncdb management command would create User instance for anonymous user support (with name of AnonymousUser).

Note

The Guardian anonymous user is different to the Django Anonymous user. The Django Anonymous user does not have an entry in the database, however the Guardian anonymous user does. This means that the following code will return an unexpected result:

from guardian.compat import get_user_model
User = get_user_model()
anon = User.get_anonymous()
anon.is_anonymous()   # returns False

If ANONYMOUS_USER_ID is set to None, anonymous user object permissions are disabled. You may need to choose this option if creating a User object to represent anonymous users would be problematic in your environment.

We can change id to whatever we like. Project should be now ready to use object permissions.

Optional settings¶

In addition to required ANONYMOUS_USER_ID setting, guardian has following, optional configuration variables:

GUARDIAN_RAISE_403¶

New in version 1.0.4.

If set to True, guardian would raise django.core.exceptions.PermissionDenied error instead of returning empty django.http.HttpResponseForbidden.

Warning

Remember that you cannot use both GUARDIAN_RENDER_403 AND GUARDIAN_RAISE_403 - if both are set to True, django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured would be raised.

GUARDIAN_RENDER_403¶

New in version 1.0.4.

If set to True, guardian would try to render 403 response rather than return contentless django.http.HttpResponseForbidden. Would use template pointed by GUARDIAN_TEMPLATE_403 to do that. Default is False.

Warning

Remember that you cannot use both GUARDIAN_RENDER_403 AND GUARDIAN_RAISE_403 - if both are set to True, django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured would be raised.

GUARDIAN_TEMPLATE_403¶

New in version 1.0.4.

Tells parts of guardian what template to use for responses with status code 403 (i.e. permission_required). Defaults to 403.html.

ANONYMOUS_DEFAULT_USERNAME_VALUE¶

New in version 1.1.

Due to changes introduced by Django 1.5 user model can have differently named username field (it can be removed too, but guardian currently depends on it). After syncdb command we create anonymous user for convenience, however it might be necessary to set this configuration in order to set proper value at username field.

GUARDIAN_GET_INIT_ANONYMOUS_USER¶

New in version 1.2.

Guardian supports object level permissions for anonymous users, however when in our project we use custom User model, default function might fail. This can lead to issues as guardian tries to create anonymous user after each syncdb call. Object that is going to be created is retrieved using function pointed by this setting. Once retrieved, save method would be called on that instance.

Defaults to "guardian.management.get_init_anonymous_user".